Saturday, March 24, 2012

smoke funny structure

Pause for a smoke. Paws for break.

Sometime a particular piece of music can inspire laughter because of the contrast it makes with its environment. Usually when I walk through the garage on my way to the vegetable garden on the days when the gardener is working on the main garden, there is pop music on Radio 2. Paul, the gardener tends to keep the radio on even when he is working out of earshot. Today what do I hear but The Blue Danube issuing forth among petrol smells? He seems to have acquired an MP3 player or tape deck. For some reason the anomaly of the sugared waltz tune makes me laugh, or perhaps it the music of a remote place and different time with its images of flying skirts and men in tails with arched backs and thin moustaches.

People are being asked by The Manchester Museum of Science to grow sunflowers to mark the birth of the great mathematician Alan Turing. The idea is to take further the research he began but never finished into the structure of the flowers. Like many other flowers the numbers and arrangement of seed and petals seem invariably to be Fibonacci numbers ie they follow the sequence 1, 3, 5, 8, 13 ... where the next number in a sequence is the sum of the two previous numbers. It is suggested that the structure apart from illustrating a strictly mathematical sequence provides the flower with optimum strength to support its seeds and petals.

About Me

Compasses

Following their Handbook for Explorers collaboration on the Compasses site (link below), Lucy Kempton and I are working together on a new venture, Questions. This is a series of poems submitted by each of us alternately, and prompted in the case of each poem by the previous poem and a new question. It is a process of adventure and discovery. Join us for the ride.http://www.compasses-lucyandjoe.blogspot.com/